Moments later-the speed of modern computers still sometimes astonished Smith, who had cut his analytic teeth in the halcyon days of Univac-a color image appeared.
It showed a nearly featureless white man, bearded, but wearing dense wraparound sunglasses and a deerstalker cap.
Smith blinked. The system had generated a face that was a cross between Sherlock Holmes and the Unabomber.
Obviously, he was working with insufficient data.
Saving the image as a file, Smith returned to the task at hand. Perhaps one of the other profilers would do better. After all, profiling was not an exact science ....
Chapter 24
Midway through dinner-Remo had ordered mako shark out of habit-he realized the merry look in Jean's eyes wasn't there because she had won seven million dollars courtesy of the state of Massachusetts, but because she was in love with him.
Not lust like most women, but love. It had been a gleam in her eye from the first, but now it was open and unconcealed.
"So," Remo said, putting down his fork, "what's the attraction? It can't be my pheromones. They've been pretty quiet lately."
She smiled. Her lips were very red. They went with her eyes somehow.
"Last summer, I had my Tarot cards read," she said, leaning forward. "Guess what the woman said."
"Search me."
"'You're coming into money.'"
"They all say that."
"It came true, didn't it? Now shut up and listen. Then she flipped a couple of cards over and said, 'I see you on a beach. There's a man walking the beach with his head down. Dark hair and dark eyes. He has unusual energy.'"
"That could be anyone."
"'And wrists like two-by-fours.'"
Remo's knife and fork froze in midair. "She said that?"
Jean nodded. "Her exact words. So when I saw you, I knew exactly who you were."
Her smile lit up her crinkling eyes.
"Who am I?"
"Let's just say this-there's still time to run."
"I don't run from anything," said Remo. But his dark eyes were worried.
They drove to the beach and walked its entire length and back again. A cold moon came up and washed them in its pristine light.
They were still there when the sun rose.
Chapter 25
If Mearl Streep hadn't had the misfortune to be christened Mearl Streep, a lot of things might have been different.
For one thing, he wouldn't get all those annoying telephone calls at all hours asking for an autographed picture of himself in drag.
For another, he'd still be teaching the fifth grade.
Mearl Streep's rise to fame changed all that. Between the calls at night and the scrawls on the blackboard of James L. Reid Grammar School in the daytime, Mearl Streep had been practically drummed out of polite Iowa society.
In the beginning, it was only miserable. Then his brother passed on, and Mearl inherited the family farm. That made it bearable. Nobody cared what a simple corn farmer called himself.
But Mearl's heart wasn't in corn. It was in being somebody, and being Mearl Streep was a plain losing proposition.
"How the hell do I get me some respect?" he asked his dog, the only companion he had who didn't snicker behind his back.
Old Blue barked a time or two and lay down and began snoring.
"Life is against me. That's all there is to it," he muttered.
Old Blue rolled over and passed gas.
"And if it's against me, then by damn, I'm going to be against it," Mearl said firmly, fanning the air with his seed cap.
It was one thing to blow off steam on a farm in the middle of the Corn State where no one cared. It was another to keep doing it. Mearl got tired of listening to his own complaints and took to listening to the radio.
There were some pretty interesting new personalities on the radio during the good days before the Great Flood. First there was Thrush Limburger. He really got the blood coursing. But after a while, he started sounding more and more like an eastern windbag, shifting with the changing political winds.
Others came. They went, too. Louder, more feisty than the ones before. After a while, all the sound and fury died down and there was nothing good on. Nothing for a hardworking but bored corn farmer to listen to.
Then interesting things started happening. Ruby Ridge. Waco. Folks were talking about how Washington was going to be moving against the people pretty soon, and some of the loudest voices in radio started disappearing. Folks blamed bad ratings, but Mearl wondered. It sounded vaguely sinister. So Mearl bought himself a shortwave set and took up listening to Mark from Minnesota, a program devoted to warning folks about the coming insurrections with the black helicopters and the New World Order and suchlike.
Not four months after Waco, came the Great Flood of 1993. The hundred-year flood, they called it.
It wiped out Mearl Streep. He barely escaped the moving wall of black puddinglike mud that rolled over his farm after the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers overflowed in the wake of a four-hour goosedrowner of a rainstorm. Eight dirtdrumming inches fell. A crest of water twenty-seven feet high rolled off the Raccoon and ran smack into the swollen Des Moines.
From that tumultuous collision, it spread out in all directions like a cold wrath of the Almighty coming to clear off the earth.
That night, Mearl sat on high ground in his red Dodge pickup and listened to Mark from Minnesota proclaim God's honest truth.
"This so-called flood was no act of God. God don't flood the farms of God-fearing people. This was Washington. They are experimenting with their weather-control devices and figure the best people to try it on are farmers. What do farmers know? They get rained on, droughted on and hailed on all the time. They'll get over it. Well, listen my brothers out there in the heartland. Don't get over it. Get even. You who are organized into militia, get ready. Those who aren't, what are you waiting for?"
"By damn, what am I waiting for?" Mearl asked himself over the relentless hammering of raindrops on his truck roof.
Thus was born the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia, led by Commander Mearl Streep.
At first, no one wanted to join. There were no militia in Iowa. It was a peaceful state and folks were too busy cleaning up the black mud and trying to get back to normal to join anything but the unemployment line.